I’m sitting here in my comfy chair, before I get up, shower, dress, and go out into the world for another day. I’m looking at the rug.

It’s an oriental rug.

Now-a-days they make the rugs with computers and machines. Used to be people.

Oriental rugs are awfully complicated. They have all kinds of intricate patterns and colors, and edges which let you know how old they are by how much they’ve frayed.

Oriental rugs are designed for you to turn over the corner to look at the knots and how tight.

You can imagine, and I do, the old practiced fingers with a mind of their own. They see a pattern that isn’t there yet. They emerge it into existence.

Even if I see them doing it, those flying fingers warping and woofing, like cats and dogs chasing each other, my mind boggles. It tends to boggle under such circumstances.

I don’t know how they do it. I couldn’t.

And it’s not just patterns and color. They’re symbols. They mean something beyond intricate pretty.

They teach you. Not only what to think and how, but also how to live. Even if you can’t read, you learn wisdom through your feet.

They teach you to wear slippers when you walk on them so they can outlast you and be part of a family legacy for your children’s children.

They’ve been around for hundreds and hundreds of years, the technique that’s art, and they humble us if we let them. We in the arrogant west want to think we’re “it.” We try not to remember how we went east, through middle east, found Arabian carpets that could fly, and farther east we discovered silk.

Those middle ages people had a hard time being behind the times. It took Marco Polo to discover how to bang and put powder into guns like a new idea.

And steel. We middle ages west people did know how to make it heavy to weigh us down as we crusaded east. But what a sobering shock to find, going east, everybody and everything was more refined, including steel.

I read about it in books when I was a boy, like Ivanhoe, all those books that were fun to read but where you learned things they may not want you to know. That’s when children read books.

Like when west met east, the heavy broadsword hit the silken pillow and only pounded it attempting submission, but the super-refined steel of the Saracen blade with a stay-sharp edge could slice through even floating silk.

And going more and more east, India and China and Japan, the same sharp edge of the Samurai sword. How could it be that “they” were so far ahead of “us”?

“We” fought back, by sending Marco Polo so he could bring back spaghetti and pretend it was Italian.

Meanwhile, I’m sitting here, looking at the rug.